KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr. Ton Kalker

Title: Multimedia Security: Technology and Society

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Ton Kalker received both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1979 and 1983, respectively. He has made significant contributions to the field of media security, in particular digital watermarking, robust media identification and interoperability of Digital Rights Managements systems. His research in this growing field started in 1996, submitting and participating in the standardization of video watermarking for DVD copy protection. His solution was accepted as the core technology for the proposed DVD copy protection standard and earned him the title of Fellow of the IEEE (2002). His subsequent research focused on robust media identification, where he laid the foundation of the Content Identification business unit of Philips Electronics (currently Civolution), successful in commercializing watermarking and other identification technologies. Dr. Kalker is co-author on 40+ granted patents, 40+ patent applications and many scholarly publications. He has a lifetime h-index of 38 (28 since 2008) [Google Scholar:http://goo.gl/1NHTpX].

Dr. Kalker is currently VP of Emerging Technologies at DTS. Prior to that he was VP of Technology for the Innovation Center of Huawei in Santa Clara, responsible for driving the media research program, focusing on real-time communication, media technologies for future Internet architectures, and HMI. Prior to Huawei, as a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard Labs, he focused his research on the problem of non-interoperability of DRM systems. He was one of the three lead architects of Coral, publishing a standard framework for DRM interoperability in the summer of 2007. Subsequently, he co-chaired the Technical Working Group of DECE (http://www.decellc.com), publicly known as UltraViolet (http://www.uvvu.com).

Professionally produced multimedia content is caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, creators may spend enormous sums of money to produce high-value content, hopefully to be recuperated by a paying audience. On the other hand, the target audience is not just interested in the (hopefully captivating) content, but also in the way that this content may be consumed and for what price. Unfortunately, these two different views on multimedia creation and consumption lead to a societal tension that is not easily resolved. In particular, the content industry is putting in place various technical and legal means to address the unauthorized use (and lack of payment) of professional content. However, these means are quite frequently deemed to interfere with both user expectations (i.e. technically restricted content consumption) and basic human freedoms (i.e. societal fallout of perceived over-zealous legislation).

In the first half of this presentation we sketch the evolving history of multimedia security and content protection, how we have arrived at where we are today. In particular, we focus on the progress of multimedia security technology, its effectiveness and its impact on society, with special emphasis on privacy aspects. In the second half of this presentation we look into the future, and try to make some educated guesses on what is in stall for us, and what the contribution of the signal processing community can be.

Prof. Sethuraman Panchanathan

Title : Person-Centered Multimedia Computing: A New Paradigm Inspired by Assistive and Rehabilitative Applications

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Sethuraman Panchanathan is currently the Senior Vice President of the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development for Advancing Research, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development. He is a foundation chair in Computing and Informatics and Director of the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC). Dr. Panchanathan was the founding director of the School of Computing and Informatics and was instrumental in founding the Biomedical Informatics Department at ASU. He was also the chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Panch’s research interests are in the areas of Human-centered Multimedia Computing; Face/Gait Analysis and Recognition; Haptic User Interfaces; Medical Image Processing; Media Processor Designs and Ubiquitous Computing Environments for enhancing quality of life for individuals with disabilities. CUbiC’s flagship project iCARE for individuals who are blind and visually impaired won the Governor’s Innovator of the Year- Academia Award in November 2004. Panch has published over 400 papers in refereed journals and conferences and has mentored over 100 graduate students, post-docs, research engineers and research scientists who occupy leading positions in academia and industry. He has been a chair of many conferences, program committee member of numerous conferences, organizer of special sessions in several conferences and an invited speaker, panel member in conferences, universities and industry. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), National Academy of Inventors (NAI), Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE) and member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

ABSTRACT

Person-Centered Multimedia Computing: A New Paradigm Inspired by Assistive and Rehabilitative Applications

Human Centered Multimedia Computing (HCMC) has recently emerged as a field of computational science where human-centered principles of design are core to the creation of multimedia systems. However, multimedia technologies and solutions are still largely focused on the “able” population. HCMC is anchored on the explicit needs of the broader population. Success of future multimedia systems requires capturing both the explicit and implicit needs of the user. The implicit needs of the “able” population are best represented by the explicit needs of individuals with disabilities and impairments. At the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC), we have focused on working with individuals with a range of disabilities to understand, model and build technologies, devices and environments to promote independence and improve quality of life. The range of the implicit needs and the diversity of disabilities mandate a person-centered methodologies to address the comprehensive set of challenges faced by these individuals. We therefore propose a Person-Centered Multimedia Computing (PCMC) approach inspired by assistive and rehabilitative applications. We present two case studies that exemplify this new PCMC paradigm. The first case study presents the computational framework of the Social Interaction Assistant—an assistive environment to improve access to visual, nonverbal social cues, such as facial expressions and gestures, for individuals who are blind. The second case study describes the design of person-centered wearable technologies to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of at-home rehabilitation for stroke survivors.

Prof. Wen Gao

Title : A New Domain-oriented Video Coding

BIOGRAPHY

Prof. Wen Gao received his Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1991. He is a professor of computer science at the Peking University from Feb. of 2006, and the vice president of NSFC from Feb. of 2013. He joined with the Harbin Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1995, as professor, department head of computer science. He was with Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) from 1996 to 2005. During his career in CAS, he served as the managing director of ICT from 1998 to 1999, the executive vice president of Graduate School of CAS from 2000 to 2004, the vice president of University of Science and Technology China from 2000 to 2003. Dr. Gao is working at the areas of video coding, video processing, computer vision, and multimedia. He is a Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of ACM.

ABSTRACT

Image and video data are becoming a majority in the big data, and any reasonable improvement of video coding efficiency may get a big cost saving in transmission and/or storage. In 2013, the join collaborative team between ISO and ITU-T finished the standard of HEVC/H.265, which achieved about 50% bits saving compared than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC with the comparable visual quality in the conditions of random access, low delay, and all-intra coding. Under IEEE standard association, there is a working group working on domain-oriented video coding, named P1857 working group, and the researchers in this group are looking for new model/technology on domain-specific for efficient video coding. IEEE std 1857 issued in early of 2013, its performance is equivalent to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. IEEE P1857.4 is scheduled to finish in this year, which aims to make better performance in the coding efficiency compared with HEVC/H.265 at the application domains of internet video and broadcasting video, interactive video communication, and video for editing, by using a model based coding schema. Similar idea is also workable to internet video coding area. This talk will discuss the recent developments of domain-oriented video coding technology, specifically on the technical achievement of IEEE P1857.4, and the challenging problems and future directions.